Wonderland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  People who passed Mrs. Pedersen and Jesse on the bridge glanced at them oddly. What did they see?

  It distressed Jesse that he must always exist in the eyes of others, their power extended in him though he did not choose them, did not choose them deliberately at all. They were a pressure on him, in his head, a pressure he loathed. He turned his mind away. Yes, he still liked to stare down at the locks. Water levels rising, falling—furious little man-made waterfalls—men far below the bridge, going about their work. Everything was ordinary. Everything was perfect, in miniature. Long, thin rays of sunlight stretched everywhere, onto the rock at the side of the canal, onto the cement and iron railings and warning signs and the glinting windows of the officials’ building far below, scanning the surface of the dark water. There was a cool, bluish tone to the shadow that fell from the bridge onto the water. Jesse felt a little dizzy. He could not distinguish between the crashing drone of the water and Mrs. Pedersen’s chatter in his ear.

  At the University of Buffalo he made his way through small crowds of students, many of them girls, on his way to the library. He climbed a long, slow hill, watchful of the people about him—these young people who never seemed to notice him, or who glanced at him and then away, not recognizing him as a person nearly their own age. The girls seemed delicate and insubstantial, because he was accustomed to the heartier forms of his mother and sister. These girls, with their long, curled hair and their summer dresses, did not seem real to him. Such pretty faces!—but they were not quite real. Jesse sat reading in the library for hours. Electric fans cooled the building but did not reduce the humidity. Sometimes Jesse was distracted by a young woman sitting across from him, and his face grew warm, his forehead filmed over with perspiration, though he knew the girl would not look at him—he was not an attractive boy, he knew, with his serious heavy face and his suits and ties and perfect polished shoes. It would have been difficult for anyone to guess his age. Sixteen? Twenty-five? Thirty?

  After hours of reading he had to rub his eyes to ease them. Was his vision failing? He would get glasses like Dr. Pedersen’s, wide-rimmed, with wires that curved precisely behind the ears. And he would become a doctor, he would take on the appearance of a doctor.… Around him were young men who would probably be going into the army in a few months, whose conversation was often about the “war,” when Jesse chanced to overhear it, but Jesse did not think about the war in Europe; it was not quite real to him. Dr. Pedersen had said that in twenty years there would be another war anyway. Always another war! War is programmed in the genes of man, Dr. Pedersen said. The thought seemed to please him and so it pleased Jesse as well. There would always be a war somewhere. Nothing came to an end; just like these streams of sweet-faced, birdlike young women who made their way along the university paths—there was no real ending to them, their legs carried them safely everywhere, pulsing like protoplasm in the warm rich sunlight. At times Jesse felt a sense of joy, knowing he was destined to serve such women. He would be a doctor. He would serve these people, save them from pain and terror, preserve the beauty of their bodies—the gross, sensual, gleaming beauty of female bodies, even these slender bodies! He sometimes paused, smiling, and stared at a girl—the look of her perfect body would inspire a peculiar, sharp hunger in him, in his mouth—pinpricks of desire in his mouth that caused his saliva to flow. When men came along his eye darted to them, jealously and then admiringly, for they were not really rivals of his … he was pleased at the way the young men strode by the women, men in a field of females, making their way firmly, unconsciously; he loved to see the men overtake the women, fall into step with them, talk to them, brush against them accidentally.… The females seemed to Jesse mere lovely animal life, surging and shimmering in the sun, and he, Jesse Pedersen, a point of scrutiny inside the field of their movement, an intelligence to give direction to their energy, sharing in the accidental touching of their flesh by the men. Their skin was so tender, so sweet, it might be stretched out seamlessly for hundreds of yards, lacking identity, belonging to any of them.… Occasionally he saw a younger boy, skinny and ill-clothed, maybe half his size, hiking up the hills in long awkward strides, looking too frail for the race, and he felt his heartbeat quicken as he thought of his own future, his own fate as Karl Pedersen’s son, going out into the world to serve the sick, to carry on his father’s dedication.…

  But he wouldn’t be going into such a future if his other father hadn’t killed everyone in the family.

  And then, in August, a few weeks before he was to leave for Ann Arbor, two strange things happened.

  Mrs. Pedersen had been begging him to take her along to Buffalo so that she could shop. Finally he agreed reluctantly—so many miles of her chatter! She was complaining now of dizzy spells, of Frederich not brushing his teeth, of Hilda not bothering to change her underwear for days at a time—“By the time she puts it in the wash it’s just filthy!”—and her whining was like a constant draft against the side of his head, maddening him. She complained of his plans to go to college. In a few weeks he would be gone, she said. He would be far away in Michigan and he wouldn’t think of them at all.

  “I’ll write every week. I’ll call you,” Jesse promised.

  “You’ll be too busy. You and your books,” she said.

  Jesse left her off at Main Street and he went to the library; but when he returned, at the time they had planned to meet, she was not there. He stood at the corner and waited, looking up and down the streets, waiting for her to appear and call to him. After a while he began to worry. Had he forgotten the correct time? Was he in the wrong place? If she wasn’t there soon they would be late returning to Lockport and Dr. Pedersen—who did not know about these trips of Mrs. Pedersen’s—would be very angry.

  He got so nervous that he stepped into a drugstore and bought several candy bars to eat while waiting for her.

  And then … and then he caught sight of an extremely fat woman in the distance, nearly hidden by a late-afternoon crowd of shoppers … she moved with a strange bobbing motion, like a boat or a huge cork … her bright yellow dress was a terrible assault upon the eye. It was Mrs. Pedersen. Yes. People turned to look at her, some children circled her, giggling, and Jesse was embarrassed for her until he saw that she didn’t notice—she was walking in a daze, her face moonstruck and stark, and she would have passed by within a few feet of him if he hadn’t called out, “Mother!”

  She gaped at him, frightened. Her eyes could not focus.

  “What’s wrong? What happened to you?” Jesse cried.

  “A little … little dizzy,” she said. She stood for several minutes without moving, while Jesse glanced miserably at the faces of passers-by. He wondered if the sun had made her dizzy, if she had walked too far, if someone had insulted her …? But she did not explain.

  “… time is it?”

  “Almost four-thirty.”

  “Dr. Pedersen will be home … he’ll be home.…”

  She looked around, confused.

  “He won’t be home until six,” Jesse said.

  He was able to help her back to the car and they got home in time, but Mrs. Pedersen sent word with Dora that she was “dizzy” and couldn’t come down to dinner. She did not even appear the next morning at breakfast.

  Then, one day when Jesse came home late in the afternoon himself, his briefcase heavy with books and his head girdled with a headache like a tight crown, he noticed something strange about the house: no piano notes. He set the briefcase down in the foyer, he listened with his head inclined to one side—but no, nothing, no music.

  “Mother?” he called out.

  He went back to the kitchen where something was baking—it smelled like apple pie—but there was no one around. He went back to the sun porch, but Hilda was not there. In the music room there was no Frederich, only the deep-cushioned chair at the piano and many piles of books and music, and, on the piano, a large sheet of paper covered with spidery notes and lines. A dish with the remains of a mincemeat pudd
ing lay on top of the piano.

  Jesse heard voices upstairs and he ran up—there were Hilda, Frederich, Dora, and Henry in the hallway. Hilda turned to him. “Thank God,” she said. “You can get her out—”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Henry was at the door to the hall bathroom, and Dora and Frederich stood a few feet away, watching. Henry was turning the doorknob and saying in a wheedling, coaxing voice, “Mrs. Pedersen? Mrs. Pedersen? How come you got this door locked?”

  “What happened?” Jesse cried.

  “She went in there and she won’t come out. It’s been hours now,” Dora said.

  “She was bothering me downstairs,” Hilda said nervously, “and I told her to leave me alone … and so she went out, about one-thirty … and Dora hasn’t seen her since then.…”

  “Are you sure she’s in there?” Jesse said.

  “She must be. The door is locked,” said Henry.

  Jesse wanted to rap on the door but he hesitated. “Mother?” he said.

  “She won’t answer,” said Henry. “I been calling to her and she won’t answer.”

  Jesse rapped timidly on the door.

  “If Father comes home and finds her—” Hilda said.

  “Don’t say that. She might be listening to us,” Jesse whispered.

  Frederich began to back away quietly.

  “She’s crazy. I don’t love her, I don’t want to see her again,” Hilda said.

  “Don’t talk like that!” said Jesse.

  “I hope Father does come home. I hope he finds her!”

  “Why don’t you go away,” Jesse said nervously, “until she comes out … why don’t you all go away and let Henry and me try to get the door down?” He rapped again on the door but there was no answer. “Mother? Are you sick? Can’t you open the door? Then Henry and I can take it off the hinges, all right? Should we take the door down? Mother?”

  Silence.

  Henry went to get a screwdriver. Jesse, his warm face pressed against the door, tried to talk Mrs. Pedersen into coming out. “Mother, it’s almost dinnertime. Why won’t you talk to us? Hilda didn’t mean what she said, she loves you very much.… Mother, nobody is here now but Henry and me. Just Henry and me. We have a screwdriver and we’re going to take the door off the hinges. Is that all right? We’ve got to open the door before Father comes home … Father wouldn’t understand, he might be angry.… We’re going to take the door off now, Mother. Don’t be afraid.”

  He and Henry did not look at each other as they worked.

  At last the door was unhinged and with a grunt Jesse lifted it away from the frame. And then he saw in the bathroom, on the floor by the tub, the body of Mrs. Pedersen. Henry cried out but did not move. Jesse’s eyesight went blank, black, and then came into focus again: yes, it was Mrs. Pedersen. She lay naked, on her back. Her skin was stretched and flabby, a terrible sight, her face simply a further expanse of flushed skin, the eyes half-open upon dull moonish eyeballs, the mouth open and gaping. She breathed hoarsely. Her body trembled and shuddered unevenly, in waves, and the perfumed water in the tub behind her shivered as if in sympathy; tiny, almost invisible ripples ran along the floor to the wall.…

  Henry muttered something and turned away.

  What an enormous body! Jesse saw that her breasts were swollen, yellowish bulbs of flesh, the nipples raw, a deep red, circled with rows of tiny goose pimples as if she were very cold, though the upper part of her torso was flushed with a heat rash and her belly and thighs were also flushed. She breathed feverishly, rapidly. Lumps of flesh hung down from her belly onto the floor tile. She was like a ball of warm breathing protoplasm, an air of something fruity, yeasty, sour rising from her—then Jesse saw that she had vomited onto the floor just behind her head, and a narrow line of stale vomit led from her mouth down her neck and shoulder to the floor. He stared, speechless. He could not move but stood alone in the doorway, unable to enter or to retreat. That body! That blank, empty, dazed face! The head at the far end of the body seemed too small for it, as if it were an afterthought. So blank, so mottled and curdled a face, it could have been any face at all—it was the body that was important, exaggerated, swollen to the shape of a large oblong box, a rectangle like a barn. Brown frizzy patches of hair.… The body was so large that Jesse felt it pull at him, tug at him. Come forward. He must come forward. He could not run away. An odor of sweat about her, an odor of dirt—the earth—a closed-in smell of vomit and breath—as if she had been waiting here for years for him to discover her, in this private interior room with bathwater heavily scented and bluish.

  “Mother—” Jesse cried.

  His voice was choked.

  She stirred. Lumps of flesh like tumors hung from her hips and thighs and just above her knees, the skin mottled orange-purple, bluish, yellow; her ankles and feet were not quite so swollen, only plump and sturdy, as if about to seize him in an embrace. Jesse stared, and though he wanted to jump backward, back out into the hall, he could not move. He must wake her. He must make everything right again, he must take her robe from where it had fallen and put it on her, he must wash her face of that vomit, he must get rid of the empty liquor bottle that had rolled into a corner of the bathroom—he must act, he must take charge before Dr. Pedersen came home, and yet for several minutes he could not move at all. Mrs. Pedersen was coming to life. Her breaths thickened to groans. Her body shuddered. The eyes, milky and blind, fluttered so that Jesse could not hide, he could not turn away—he wanted to bend down and quickly close those eyes to keep her from discovering him—

  She groaned—her breathing quickened—her eyes opened suddenly and fastened themselves upon him. She looked up at him. Jesse felt as if a veil had been ripped away from her face and from his own, that they were staring at each other openly, confronting one of the terrible secrets of the world.

  10

  For several days after that Jesse moved in a private pressurized space: the very air seemed to exert a terrible pressure upon him. He could not locate it exactly on any part of his body. Sometimes he felt as if his heart might burst as he urged his body up a flight of stairs or out for a quick, desperate walk around the city—he found himself walking all the time, reluctant to come home—and sometimes his lungs ached, though he tried to breathe lightly and shallowly. At other times it was a dull ache that circled his head. He could not read now for more than half an hour at a time. He would go back to the university library in Buffalo and sit at a deserted table, a book in his hand … and yet he found after a few minutes that he was not reading at all, that his mind had gone dead.

  He considered the big, ornate doors of the room he was in, an old-fashioned reading room. Invisibly he was unscrewing the screws, pulling out the hinges, taking note of the discolored indentations in the wood.…

  In a panic, he turned back to the book he was reading: a series of lectures, given in England, on the central nervous system. Already he had read most of the books he would study in his first years of premedical school, and now he was reading books at random, suggested to him by Dr. Pedersen, books that belonged to Jesse’s remote future, an unimaginable future.…

  Nine days left before he would leave for Ann Arbor.

  They were all going with him, except Frederich. Mrs. Pedersen talked about the trip all the time. Dr. Pedersen was going to take time off from his work. Hilda, stubborn and coy at first, had finally agreed to come along. They would drive him to his dormitory room, take hotel rooms nearby, get him settled, and only when he was certain that he could manage alone would they leave him. “We won’t abandon you,” Mrs. Pedersen kept assuring him. She spoke tartly and breathlessly; she was always in a rush now, buying Jesse clothes, sewing small tidy labels on his things, even on towels—his initials, J. P. “That way nobody can steal your things. You have to be very careful,” she cautioned. At dinner she was eager to talk about how she spent her days: “Today I finally picked out a good trunk. I bought it at Williams Brothers on the condition that you approve of it, dear. Wil
l you look at it after dinner?” Dr. Pedersen shared in her enthusiasm, though he hadn’t as much time as Mrs. Pedersen to spend on Jesse. He entrusted her with all the preparations for Jesse’s departure. She was brisk and efficient, always on the telephone, arranging to take a taxi downtown in order to pick out something for Jesse, even telephoning the dormitory residence in Ann Arbor to ask about the color scheme in the room Jesse would have. So much to do! She was in a flurry, and yet she was always back in time to prepare large pleasant dinners, slipping on an apron, humming happily out in the kitchen so that Jesse always heard her as soon as he stepped in the door, as if she were humming for his benefit. I am out in the kitchen, I am normal. I am making a big normal meal.

  When she spoke to Dora, it was in the same high, efficient tone, though she seemed now to be giving Dora orders all the time. At the dinner table, her movements were sometimes abrupt; she upset her water glass two evenings in a row and Dr. Pedersen said, “Mary, whatever is wrong with you? Are you nervous about something?” She bit her lip and dabbed at herself with a napkin. “No, no, nothing at all,” she said. “I hope you aren’t working too hard these days, getting Jesse ready for college,” Dr. Pedersen said.